that we see in the later epistles, and especially in the latest, the seven epistles in Rev. ii., iii., the gilded professors grown alarmingly abundant. Suffer me again to say, Let no one presume rashly to judge a brother, but "let a man examine himself." And in doing so, these epistles to the seven churches in Asia will furnish us with an admirable help. "They are to me," says Henry Martyn, "the most searching and alarming part of the Bible." Let no one be satisfied because he knows a great deal, or has been under the influence of powerful convictions, or is conscious of zeal for doctrines, or feels at times a lively joy when exercised about divine things. These things are all needful and useful in their own place, but they are all quite as common to the gilded as to the golden. "Probably few perish," says the judicious Scott, "where the Word of God is fully preached, without many awakenings, many fears, many desires; yea, and many feeble endeavours, which are all subdued and extinguished through the love of sin."

Indeed, to a certain extent, every one of us is gilded; every professor, true and false, is more or less under the influence of a deceitful heart. The humblest among the humble is still too proud; the soul that has been most completely emptied of confidence in flesh, needs to be still further emptied. Self is never too much forsaken, nor Christ too exclusively gloried in, by any man here in the body. Even after we have put off the old man, and have put on the new, we need still to be exhorted to put on the new man (Col. iii. 9-12). Our own spiritual reality is such that we cannot, in this life, bear to have it fully disclosed to us. Let us be truly thankful if God has shown us so much of it as has sufficed to send us in self-loathing to Christ for everything; and if he be still opening up to us more of our unsuspected evils, that we may be still more simply cast on Jesus. It is the unsuspected element of the false within us which is one of our greatest snares: and therefore it is that our Lord so often warns us against self-deception. He charged the disciples first of all to beware of hypocrisy (Luke xii. 1); and Peter exhorts believers to lay aside all hypocrisy (1 Pet. ii. 1). From these, and similar warnings, we learn that hypocrisy is specially a believer's danger; understanding by the word, not the conscious fraud which is practised by the designing, but the unconscious wearing of a mask which is sure to accompany a believer's self-ignorance. And against this mask-wearing, a mask which first of all hides our real features from ourselves, we need to be all put on our guard. "It is not," says an old Puritan, "the presence of hypocrisy, but the reign of hypocrisy, that damns the soul." But though such unconscious maskwearing do not destroy us, who can tell how much it may hinder our growth or spoil our service.

What an awful view does the whole subject give us of the "depths of Satan!" How subtile is his craft, how universal his sphere of operation! He can as effectually destroy souls in his assumed disguise as an angel of light, as he can in his native form of open wickedness.

He is working in the Church as destructively as in the world. He has his one hand busy in the shaping of a professor's creed; while he has the other hand busy in the infidel's denial of it. The prayers of one man, and the blasphemies of another, are equally prompted by him. While he blows up to fury the flames of the most loathsome passions in one heart, he feeds with fuel the wildfire of false religious emotion in another. Everywhere, always, and through everything he leads the powers of darkness in their desperate conflict with the children of the light. And what a master-stroke of craft it is to fill the Church with gilded professors! Who can estimate the havoc which he is working by means of this? So soon as the Lord of the harvest sowed his field with wheat, his enemy followed his footsteps sowing the field with tares-tares, which are so like the wheat, that till they have both come to fruit they cannot be distinguished. "I could never have believed," says Luther, "but that I have good experience thereof at this day, that the power of the devil is so great, that he can make falsehood so like the truth." And he is still carrying on his work of mischief. Wherever Jesus sows his wheat, Satan is immediately on the spot, scattering his tares among them. And there is a depth of malicious skill in this. Not to speak at all of the fearful fact that the tares are thereby almost hopelessly sealed up to final ruin, and that, too, a ruin all the worse that it has been reached through the abuse of the very highest privileges, think of what mischief is done by such tares to all around them. Their influence on the world is hurtful; for their earthly spirit and their grievous inconsistencies are stumbling-blocks to their neighbours, and so, whether they commend the gospel, or whether they oppose it, they are in either case enemies of the cross of Christ. Their influence on each other is most hurtful, for they keep each other in countenance; nay, so numerous are they, that they often give the tone to public sentiment-a tone which is always unspeakably below the heavenly spirit which should prevail in the Church of God. And in this way their influence on true saints is hurtful; nay, who can tell how much of the slumbering of the wise virgins is owing to the deeper sleep of the foolish virgins beside them? Perhaps, after all, these gilded professors are the most efficient instruments which Satan wields in his work of destruction. Ah, my brother professor, there is no single question that can ever be so important to you or me as this: am I a grain of Christ's wheat, or am I of the devil's sowing in the Church—a miserable misery-making tare?

If we are to form our judgment from the position which this subject occupies in Holy Scripture (and what other standard of judgment have we ?), there is scarcely any question which more concerns us than this danger of self-deception. Open the Bible anywhere, and you will be almost sure to come on some reference to it. Histories, prophecies, psalms, and parables, burden themselves with this most solemn matter, in every variety of

aspects; and in the personal teaching of our Lord few subjects are made more prominent. Those who are familiar with the writings of our godly fathers, know that they, too, assigned it a place of similar prominence (sometimes, perhaps, too much sc); and yet, in certain quarters of the modern Church, such warnings are never uttered, nay, the need for them is not only ignored but vehemently denied. Is this quite safe? Would our wise and gracious God have made such full provision against this danger of self-deception, if it had not been an urgent one? From neglect of the wise use of divine warnings on this subject, there are multitudes of sinners who continue unconvinced of their sins; multitudes of self-deluded professors who continue unaware that they are entirely self-deluded; and multitudes, too, of true believers who continue distressingly ignorant of their remaining corruptions, and who, therefore, are not duly humbled under a sense of them. For want of the self-jealousy enjoined in the Bible, the Bible itself is partially lost to many, and entirely lost to myriads. Its fearful exposure of human corruption, its vehement warnings, and its solemn expostulations, are read without profit, for they are applied to others. The reader of them may see in them his neighbour's sin or his neighbour's danger; but if he be taught that it is a point of faith never to mistrust himself, he is scarcely likely to see either his own sin or his own danger. And yet, unless he faithfully apply the Word to himself, his knowledge of it is likely to be used towards making him a gilded, rather than a golden professor. It is true, indeed, that this self-inspection may be, and often is, carried too far, and that in a most legal and self-righteous spirit. But the proper remedy for this is not the total neglect of the duty; it is rather the devout recognition of the need of the Holy Spirit's help, in order to do it profitably, and the humble waiting on God for this needed and promised help.

My reader, let us try to realize the blank horror of a deluded professor, who has gone forward, smiling in his easy-minded self-delusion, to discover, when too late, that he has been labouring to hoard up, not wrath merely, but wrath on the most tremendous scale. Ah, we cannot exaggerate, we cannot even estimate the despairing horror! "It is genuine gold," said Satan to him all along; and as Satan appeared in the guise of a holy angel, and spoke as kindly as he did to Eve in Eden, he was as readily and as fatally believed. "It is gold, genuine gold," said Pride; and Pride, if it speak at all moderately, is sure to be credulously trusted. "It is gold," said Sloth, alarmed at the prospect of any needless trouble. "It is surely gold," said Worldliness,

afraid that the purchase of anything better would cost too dear. "It is gold," said each charitable friend and brother; "if your profession be not golden, it will be a pity of mine." "It is surely gold," said the deceived soul to itself; so many shrewd and competent witnesses can never be mistaken." And as it said so, it looked again at the gilded outside. Alas for it that it never asked the judgment of the "faithful true witness who never deceives!" Instead of this, it was satisfied with the flatteries of its flatterers, and went forward to the judgment-seat, hugging to its heart its fancied gold, only to learn from the lips of the final Judge that its treasure is not gold at all, but only gilded dross. What an unspeakable horror, to be aroused from a life-time's pleasant dreams by the angry words, "Bind the hypocrite together hand and foot, and cast him out!" Ah, my brother! if this appalling doom be not yours and mine, it shall only be because we are kept from it by God's preserving mercy; a mercy which we shall do well to bespeak continually for ourselves and others.

Before concluding, it may be well to add a word of caution to the timid and sensitive disciple. Satan invariably misapplies spiritual truth, and he will endeavour to misapply this. To the whole-hearted he hands the comforts meant only for the heart-broken; while the rude shock, designed to awaken an infatuated sleeper, he applies to the tender conscience of one who may already be morbidly sensitive. Ah! beloved brother, who art down-cast with the humbling conviction that there is nothing golden at all about thee, except it be the little well-worn gilding, and who, the more thou lookest into self, discoverest infinities of evil in thyself, take courage; that is one good sign of a golden soul. For the only true gold is not man, but Christ; not human excellence, but divine grace. It is Christ within us, and Christ upon us; and the golden Christian is one who says with Paul: "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." Let no discoveries, then, of the worthlessness of self discourage thee, any more than thy discoveries of the infinite worthiness of Christ; for both together are meant to lead thee through self-despair to glory only in the Lord. And however unworthy a man may be in himself, yet in Christ (and he is in Christ if he sincerely accepts him as his Prophet, Priest, and King) he is "pure gold."

J. D.

A

UGUST 19th.-My father's wide-embracing schemes of correspondence and reconciliation have been somewhat narrowed. My brother Roland has been with us, and one or two of his friends about the Court; and he has possessed my father with dark and chilling thoughts of the Puritans.

Indeed, there is an icy touch of cynical doubt in Roland which seems to take the glow out of everything. He does not assail any person, or any party, or any belief. All parties, he protests, are good, to a certain extent, in their measure, and for their time. But he makes you feel he scorns you as a fond and incredulous fool for believing in any person, any party, or any truth, with the kind of faith which leads to sacrificing oneself. The king, he says, declares that "nothing shall ever part him again from his three kingdoms;" and the king never says a foolish thing.

According to Roland, all enthusiasm is either, in foolish men, fanaticism, or, in able men, the hypocrisy of fanaticism, put on to deceive the fanatics.

When my father declaims against Oliver Cromwell as a wild fanatic, and records instances of the destruction of painted windows and the desecration of churches, Roland shrugs his shoulders, slightly raises his eyebrows, smiles, and says:

--

"No doubt, that is what he would have had Job Forster and his fellows believe. For himself, his fanaticism had the fortunate peculiarity of always constraining him to climb as high as he could. But he should not be too severely blamed. What can a shrewd man do, when he sees every one taking the same road, but travel a little faster than the rest, if he wishes to keep first?"

"For shame, sir!" said my father. "Say what you like of the Puritans of to-day; I will suffer no profane allusions to the good people who lived at the Christian era."

"Pardon me, sir!" retorted Roland. "Anno Domini has no doubt made those who lived in it sacred; except of course, the Pharisees and a few other reprobates, who are fair mark. But, I assure you, nothing could be further from my intention than to cast the slightest imputation on that excellent widow. I only suggest that if her circumstances improved, no doubt her views enlarged with them. She would naturally feel that while two mites might be bestowed without regard to results, larger possessions involved wider responsibilities, and must, therefore, be dispensed with more prudence; as the Rabbis (who, no doubt, we should charitably suppose, started with intentions as pure) had found out before."

"Speak plainly," said my father; "none of your court riddles for me. Do you mean to say the Puritans were like that good widow or like the Pharisees?" "Sir," replied Roland, "you must excuse me if my charity reaches to a later century than yours. You forbid any imputations on the early Christians; I decline to make any against those of a later date. I would leave the sentence to events. Before long there is reason to hope that many of the Puritans will once more have an opportunity of proving their principles, and, if they like, of returning to the exemplary condition of the widow with the one farthing."

"What do you mean? There are to be no confiscations."

"I mean that the Savoy Conference will, I think, issue otherwise than Mr. Baxter and his friends desire. Presbyterian shepherds, Independent lions, and Episcopal lambs will, I think, scarcely at present be made to lie down in the ample fold of the Church; and the

"At first, probably, many of them," he said. "When they had only two mites to give, doubtless they gave then. It is the destiny of mites to be spent in that manner. Happily for the widow in the New Testament, her subsequent history is not told."

course, be expected to withdraw, especially after having tried the tender mercies of the outside world as long as they have."

"It is all the clergy!" said my father, provoked into indiscriminating irritation with some one, as he always is in discussions with Roland. "It is always the

parsons and the preachers who won't let the people be quiet. Banish them all to the plantations, and we should have peace to-morrow."

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"And twice as many parsons and preachers to break it the day after to-morrow," said Roland. They have been trying it in England for these eleven years; and I think you will find that has been the result."

"Roland," said my father, changing the conversation, "we must find some way of showing our gratitude to the Draytons. Every corner of the demesne is in better order than I left it."

"Mr. Drayton is a clear-sighted man," was the reply, "and no doubt foresaw that the rightful owners would return. However, we cannot be too grateful; and no doubt circumstances will give us opportunities of returning his kindness. He will scarcely himself escape some little fines, which we can get lightened. Besides, they are sure, sooner or later, to get entangled with some of the laws against conventicles; Mistress Dorothy, or some of them. It is the way of the family. And then we can be the mouse to nibble the lion's net."

"At least," I said, "you cannot accuse the Draytons of hypocrisy."

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Scarcely," he replied coolly; "they are on the other side of the balance, where consciences weigh heavier than brains. But, at all events," he added, turning to my father, we are sure to be able to assist Mr. Drayton's son; for, from all I hear, he is scarcely out of the circle of those who are liable to the punishment of treason, so that you may set your mind quite at rest, sir, as to having opportunities of showing our gratitude."

I know he said this to silence me. And it did silence me. I dared not defend the Draytons, for fear of further rousing my father against them.

But Walter, who had been listening to the debate hitherto with some amusement, here broke in.

"Roger Drayton is no traitor," said he. "He took the wrong side, unfortunately for him, and you the right side; but a more loyal gentleman does not breathe." "That depends on the construction the crown-lawyers set on loyalty," retorted Roland.

And the conversation ceased.

August 20th.-After that discussion, Roland had a walk with my father round the estate, and the next morning he said to me :

"I will not have the family disgraced, Lettice, by Walter's reckless ways. If he must beg or borrow, let him beg or borrow of some of those gay courtiers who help him to spend. Not of a man like Roger Drayton, to whom we already owe too much-a Puritan too, a soldier of the usurper'; and, for aught I know, a regicide." "Did Walter borrow of Roger Drayton?" I said, and this time I could not help flushing crimson.

"Yes, yes!" he replied, angrily; "and Roland says, moreover, child, it was thou who introduced them to each other. I will have no clandestine intercourse, Lettice. Thou shalt see I will not!

"Father," I said, rising, "has Roland's poisonous tongue gone as far as that? Does he dare to accuse me or Roger Drayton of that? If you wish to know what the understanding between Roger Drayton and me is, it is this-I thought you knew it; my mother did. We have promised to be true to each other till death, and beyond it, for ever. And the promise was scarce needed. For the love that makes it sacred was there before."

For they had called Roger a traitor. And it was no time to measure words.

I write these down, because I like to see them, as well as to remember that I said them. My father drew a long breath.

"Pretty words," he said, "for a lady who recognizes the divine right of kings, parents, and all in authority." He paced up and down the room for some time, speaking to himself.

"Very strange, very strange," he said; "up to a certain point as gentle as her mother; and once past that, like a lioness. Very strange."

And then still to himself,

"'Tis a pity; 'tis a thousand pities. If he had been anything but what Roland says every one says he is ; if he had been only a little misled! But now impossible; of course, impossible!"

""Tis a pity, Lettice," he then said to me in a vexed tone, but very courteously. "Roland told me of a neighbour of ours, a good and loyal gentleman, who would be but too proud of the honour of my daughter's hand. As fine an estate as any in the country, and marching with our own. 'Tis a pity, child, for I should not have lost thee. And I should do ill without thee." "You will not lose me, father,” I said.

“Nay, nay,” he said, “thou art one to be trusted, I know that well. Never believe I doubt that, Lettice, for any hasty word I speak. Never believe I doubt that."

And he kissed me and went his way.

No, he does not doubt me. But there is something in Roland which tempts one to doubt everything and every one.

Did I say his touch was icy? Would it were only that. Frost rouses nature to a vigorous resistance, or checks it with strengthening repression. There is a healthy frost of doubt which kills the insects which infest piety, and checking the too luxuriant growths of faith with a wholesome cold, braces them from mere leafage to solid stem and fruit.

But Roland's influence is not the wholesome winter of doubting and inquiring, which seems to interpose between the successive summers of advancing faith, testing its roots. It is a languid atmosphere of doubt, in which everything is alike uncertain; everything alike mean, worthless, earthly. The disbelief in goodness itself, and truth itself, which, like a pestilential malaria, rises from the sloughs of a wicked life, such as our Court encourages. In the depths of its degradation I

believe he himself scorns to soil the sole of his foot. But he stands on the edge and breathes the poison into his brain, and breathes it out again in bitter and cynical talk.

While poor reckless Walter, capable not merely of creeping safely along the dull wayworn ways of life, but of soaring to its noblest heights, plunges into the midst of the pollution; until the very wings with which he was meant to soar upward are clogged with the evil thing; and instead of buoying him upwards, drag him downwards, helpless, blinded, so that he can not only no longer soar, but scarcely even creep.

What will the end be?

Often this weighs on me more than even Roger's peril. For that is not for the soul, which is the man ; and that is but for the moment.

Sometimes my spirit sinks, sinks as if its wings, too, were all clipped and broken. And I have dreadful visions of one precious life ending in dishonour before man here, in this England, in this age; and the other in dishonour before God and good men for ever. And Roland standing by and observing both, and saying, with a lifting of his eyebrows, between pity and scorn,—

"Yes, that is the issue of passion, for syrens-or for clouds. That is the result of giving the reins to enthusiasms; religious or otherwise. Poor Walter; and poor Roger! With a few grains more of self-interest and common sense, they might both have stood where I stand, and learned the vanity of everything in the world or out of it, except, as the preacher says, getting well through it."

August 27th.-The minister who succeeded Placidia Nicholls' husband during the Commonwealth has been superseded by Dr. Rich, a scholar who seems to have lived through those stormy times scarce hearing their tumult; so near and so much more important seem to him the tumults and controversies of former times. He will scarce assert that Monday is the day after Sunday, without proving it by citations from a catena of fathers and schoolmen; which sets one piously questioning, whether what needs so many authorities to sustain it is itself substantial. Otherwise, the matter of his statements seem so free from everything every one does not believe, that one would have thought no proof needed.

A most friendly, blameless, and harmless gentleman, however, he is; although weighed down a little as to thinking by the authority of so many ancients, and as to living by the necessities of eleven motherless children, who have to be fed and instructed; since, unfortunately, the children of such a learned man came into the world as destitute of Patristical lore as if they had been born in the first century, or their father were a Leveller.

It does seem hard that so much learning cannot become hereditary, like pointing, or retrieving. It is such a great hindrance in the way of the moderns being so much wiser than the ancients as they ought to be.

On one page of modern ecclesiastical history, however, it is easy to make Dr. Rich, or any of his eleven, elo

quent. And that is the record of the good deeds of Olive and Dr. Antony, who seem to have maintained and lodged the whole family throughout the times of the Commonwealth. They are worthy, he says, to have lived in the days of the Apostolic Fathers; and tears come into his eyes when he speaks of Olive's little devices for delicately helping him. "She thought I was too buried in my books to see," he said. "But, in truth, I was too much overwhelmed with their kindness to speak."

The elder girls, too, have endless stories of Olive's motherly counsels and succour. From their account, Maidie and Dolly must be the blithest little un-Puritanical darlings in the world; and the boys bold little Cavaliers.

August 30th.-At our first return I felt almost more an exile in some ways than while we were in France. People had fitted into each other so closely as to leave no room for us but a kind of show-place out of every one's way. The myriads of fine interlacing fibres which bind communities together, and root each in its place, can only grow slowly, one by one, as storms straining the boughs, or summers overlading them with fruit, made them needed.

Even eleven years of mere Time almost place you in another generation. Those we left babes are shy lads and lasses; the children are young mothers at their cottage-doors, with their own babes in their arms, courtesying and wondering we do not know them; the youths and maids are sober men and matrons, giving counsel on the perils of life to the youths and maidens we left babes. And the changes of these eleven years have not been those of mere Time.

Not the people only have changed, but the country; -the whole way in which every one looks at every thing. In our youth King and Parliament were the powers which ruled and divided the world. Men of forty now scarcely remember a king really reigning. Men of twenty scarcely remember a Parliament, save the poor mockery of a "Rump" which Oliver "purged,” and which the London butchers roasted in effigythat is, in beef-at the Restoration.

The names honoured and dreaded in our youth, names scarce uttered without the eye flashing, and the cheek flushing with admiration or indignation, have passed from the regions of popular enthusiasm to the sober and silent tribunals of history. Many which seemed to us indelibly engraven on the hearts of men for renown or for abhorrence, Sir John Hotham, "the first traitor," Sir Bevil Granvill, Sir Jacob Astley, areexcept among those who personally recollect themunknown; whilst around the loftier heights still in sight strange mists of legend already begin to gather, especially among the peasantry. Prince Rupert is the "black man" with whose name men of twenty have been spell-bound into submission in the nursery. Archbishop Laud and Strafford, in our Puritan village, have | well-nigh taken the place of the Spaniard and the Pope